Software Review

Redline 1.0.3

I don’t own a car or have a driver’s license, and the last auto-racing
game I played was Night Driver on
my Atari 2600. But one night I felt like trying something new, and so I
found Ambrosia Software’s Redline. The next day my right middle finger
still felt funny from hours of holding down the “accelerate” key, and I
knew I had to write a review.

Redline, like Night Driver, challenges the player to race a car around a
track in the fastest possible time. Visually, your car stays pretty much
in the bottom center of the screen, and as you steer the track moves
around you. Accelerate, brake, crash: it’s pretty simple. That was
enough in 1980, but modern computer racers require more. Redline
delivers with options galore.

See that wall? Yeah, you might want to turn.

First off, there are several different cars you can race in, each with
its own characteristics. Ambrosia was aiming for realism here, and while
I can’t say whether their Diablo handles like a real Diablo, I can
easily tell the difference between, say, a Diablo and a Golf. As I tried
out different cars, I quickly found I had a strong preference for the
control of four-wheel drive vehicles; I’m happier driving a car that I
can control well than one that goes wicked fast and then spins like
crazy on corners.

When you play the game for the first time, you only have access to a few
of the cars Redline has to offer. Instead of making all of the cars
available right off, Redline makes you earn them in Challenges: you
drive the car you want to earn along a piece of track, sometimes
swerving around cones, in a predetermined amount of time to earn a
Bronze, Silver, or Gold medal. If you can do it (they’re all doable,
though some are much harder than others, I’ve won several Silvers but
never a Gold), you earn a new car, which you can then use in any of the
races in the game. Though at first I wished I could just race any car I
wanted to, I came to like the idea of the Challenges: they made me get
to know each car a bit before taking out for some loops around a track.

You also have a choice of tracks to race around, and weather conditions
to race in. As with the cars, I found myself developing
track-preferences. Each track has not just different graphics but
different curves and straightaways, and most interestingly, surface
conditions: there are city streets and rural roads, rolling hills and
level ground, one track even has snow. After playing for a while,
though, I started wishing Ambrosia had provided more tracks to choose
from: there are only six. A few users have created additional tracks
(available as plug-ins on the game’s Web site), but most of the plug-ins
are for additional cars.

Hint: Don’t try to drive and take screenshots at the same time.

Other than the challenges, there are three basic kinds of races you can
try. The Time Trial—my favorite—lets you keep racing round and round
your chosen track, trying to beat your best time. A ghost of your car
from your previous loop races around the track, offering a visual clue
of how well (or poorly) you’re doing against yourself. The other two
options are to race against computer-controlled opponents (you can
choose which cars you want to race against, and how many opponents you
want) or against other players on the Internet. Both of those options
perform reasonably well on my relatively old PowerBook G4.

If all of those options aren’t enough, you can also choose how realistic
you want your game play to be. There are two Arcade modes, designed to
give you insanely high speeds coupled with unnatural levels of control.
They’re great fun, and you can get into some spectacular crashes. Drive
up the side of the Canyon track and watch your car fly up into the air
and spin on three different axes—or if you’ve got a strong stomach,
switch the camera view and put yourself inside the car when it happens!
There’s a third mode which offers more realistic speeds and
responsiveness, but I quickly found that in the Simulation mode, I could
frequently save time by crashing against the walls of a course instead
of carefully braking and steering. In response to that problem, a fourth
mode with Strict gameplay was added, but it hasn’t changed the way I
play the game. (Maybe I just like crashing.)

No, really, I’m fine.

Redline’s weak point, unfortunately, is game control. It’s pretty easy
to see the problem: you can accelerate and brake and turn left and turn
right, but a real car offers degrees of all of those things. I had a
school bus driver once who drove like he was playing Redline: he’d floor
the accelerator, then take his foot off the gas and coast for a while,
then floor it again, then slam on the brakes…you know, it wasn’t the
smoothest ride. Real cars have pressure-sensitive pedals, but keyboards
don’t work that way. So unless you buy a supported joystick or steering
wheel, you’re stuck driving like my bus driver.

In Ambrosia’s defense, there’s not much that can be done in software to
mitigate this problem. They could require a suitable controller, but
that would keep the majority of Mac users from ever discovering the
game. I did come up with one idea, however: a “maintain speed”
key—equivalent to keeping even pressure on the accelerator, which is how
most people drive most of the time—would be a great help. Ideally, you
could hold down such a key while accelerating: then, take your
foot—no, your finger—off the accelerator and instead of slowing
down gradually, you can keep going at the speed you accelerated to.

My only other complaint about the game is that when it runs in
full-screen mode, it sometimes messes up the icons on my desktop after
I’m done playing. (This doesn’t always happen; usually the icons are
fine.)

Car-racing games sure have come a long way since 1980. The basic idea
hasn’t changed much—I don’t see how it can, at least until we have
flying cars—but Ambrosia has given desktop racers a heaping helping of
options: choose your car, your track, your opponents, your physics.
Whether you like impossibly fast Cooper Minis or hopelessly
uncontrollable Deloreans, Redline offers a safe and fun alternative to
driving a real Viper into a brick wall at 160mph.